1. Field
This disclosure is generally related to discovering and accessing media from one or more devices in a network and streaming this digital content to a target device or set of devices. More specifically, this disclosure is related to using a location-independent structured name to access digital content, user and device profiles, system control information and presentation state for presenting the digital content to a user.
2. Related Art
Advantages in mobile computing are making it possible for people to experience digital content from anywhere. Users can store movies, music, and pictures in their mobile devices so that they can enjoy their favorite media during brief moments of relaxation during their busy schedule. These advances in mobile computing are also increasing the quality of content that can be reproduced by these mobile devices and greatly increases the number of devices that can generate, capture and store digital content. Nowadays, even small mobile devices such as smartphones can produce full high-definition video with high-quality color reproduction, which causes users to prefer pre-loading full-definition content onto their devices, at the cost of storage space.
Unfortunately, storing high-definition video consumes a large portion of a mobile device's storage space, so that only a few movie files can be stored at a time. To avoid having to store movies locally on the portable device, some users subscribe to online streaming services such as Netflix, Pandora, etc. With these services, a user's portable device can access digital content from a collection of movies or music provided by the streaming service. While these services provide a large collection of content for their users to experience, these services do not always provide the content that the user wants to experience when the user wants to experience it. For example, a subscription-based movie-streaming service may not always have recently released movies in their inventory, which can cause the user to pay to rent these movies from an À la carte movie-streaming service. Thus, it is still oftentimes necessary for a user to pre-load his favorite movies from his personal movie collection into his portable device. Additionally, many devices are used to create user content (e.g., family outing videos and pictures of social events). However, these devices do not allow the user to stream content to one or more other devices on-demand, without having to locate and/or replicate the content on all of their devices.
While at home, some users access their digital media from a large storage device, such as a desktop computer or a local media server. Oftentimes, these storage devices are certified by the Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA), which ensures that the storage device can interoperate with DLNA-certified client devices to stream digital media. However, in order for DLNA-certified components to discover and transmit configuration information to each other, these devices need to be connected to a common local area network (LAN).
If a user desires to obtain digital content from his home DLNA network while away from home, the user has to perform the tedious task of configuring a virtual-private network (VPN) to his at-home LAN as a way to access an at-home DLNA-certified media server. Unfortunately, not many users know how to make such a network configuration. And for those that do, these users have to keep track of the network address for their at-home LAN, given that residential internet service providers tend to issue dynamic network addresses that can change at any time. If the network address changes for the user's home internet service, the user will no longer be able to access content from his at-home media server. Alternatively, users can also use third party infrastructure with a user-defined account to upload content explicitly. This requires users to duplicate storage systems and infrastructure, and places a higher burden on the user to remember which service was used to store specific content and how to access it.